Biz & IT —

ActiveState opens part of Komodo IDE

Scripting development tool company ActiveState has announced plans to open the …

ActiveState has announced plans to open a portion of the source code for the Komodo IDE, a cross-platform commercial development environment for scripting that features broad support for a variety of popular dynamic programming languages. Komodo's user interface is largely built with XUL, the XML-based interface design language used by the Firefox web browser. According to ActiveState's timeline, the source code will be available by November.

ActiveState is planning to open the underlying components of the Komodo IDE so that the open source software community can participate in development and build other IDEs on top of the same code. The Open Komodo platform will be tri-licensed under the Mozilla Public License, the General Public License, and the Lesser General Public License.

There are also plans to create an open web development environment, called SnapDragon, that will incorporate elements of Komodo and Firefox and include popular web development Firefox extensions like Firebug.

"I, as well as the rest of ActiveState, believe that Komodo is an excellent development tool that, given a more open nature, could really blossom into something far larger than it is today," ActiveState senior developer Shane Caraveo writes in his blog. "Our initial efforts with OpenKomodo will be around the development of community, and a community driven effort to create a development environment focused on the Open Web. Community is important and critical to our success."

ActiveState's decision to open portions of the Komodo source code represents a very significant contribution to the open source software community.